The Overlooker (25 page)

He was in unknown territory here.

‘Keep your eyes open,' he ordered Millie. ‘It should be somewhere over there on our right. Shout if you think you see it.'

There were more abandoned mills with lifeless eyes. Would the one they had entered look any different from this direction than the others? Were there graffiti on this side too?

‘Got it!' Millie yelled. ‘Over there. THE END TIME IS COMING.'

‘For them, it is!' Tom said.

Nick stopped the car abruptly. The three of them got out.

‘Stay here,' Nick told Millie again.

She threw him a look of exasperated scorn.

The factory was only a block away. They threaded a narrow alley and stood beneath its forbidding bulk. It stood darkly brooding against the grey evening sky. No light showed.

Nick began to feel a chill uncertainty.

Warning letters were painted across the wall in metre-high letters.

PREPARE TO MEET THY DOOM.

‘This is evidently the front entrance,' Nick said. ‘We got in round the back.'

‘Three doors, but all boarded up,' Tom observed.

‘There was a thingy on the canal side,' Millie said. ‘You know, like where they swing things out and lower them into barges.'

‘We went in through a window.' Nick was urgently scanning this side of the building to look for a weak spot. ‘But these grilles look pretty secure here.'

‘We're wasting time,' Millie urged him. ‘Why don't we just go round to the towpath, where we were before?'

‘There's a light!' Tom said suddenly.

It was a tiny bud of illumination in an end window. Nick drew his breath in a gasp so sharp it was almost painful. Someone was there. His hunch was becoming reality. No one should be in this derelict mill. And if someone was, it meant almost certainly that Suzie was in there too.

Panic was receding. He felt an almost steely determination. He knew what he had to do now.

‘I'm going round the back. Tom, you come with me. Millie, you stay here and wait for the police.'

‘Shouldn't we all wait? What if the people inside have got guns?'

‘I'm not sure they're that kind of criminal. Religious fanatics, by the sound of it. The sort that want to hurry on the end of the world. But from that paper you found, our guy seems to be more into using chemistry than firearms.'

‘You hope. Who's to say he hasn't got both?'

Nick and Tom began to move towards the corner of the mill. An inner voice was telling Nick that Millie was right. The police knew what was happening here. Tom had given them the alarming ingredients scrawled on the piece of paper. Millie had told them how to find the mill. Any moment now, police cars would come racing down this side street, lights flashing, sirens blaring. They would have the manpower, the equipment, the weapons, the experience to deal with this far better than him and Tom unarmed.

But a more urgent voice was telling him that it might not end like that. The police might come and surround the building – from a safe distance. Tom seemed certain that whoever had taken Suzie was constructing a dirty bomb. The police would surely have safety regulations. They wouldn't risk going in unprepared where a bomb might be detonated. Would they send for a specialist unit? The SAS?

How did Tom know about these things? Nick had no idea how big an explosion they were talking about, or how wide an area might be contaminated with radioactivity. He was pretty sure that anyone in the immediate vicinity would be in serious danger.

How powerful was the explosion? How close did you need to be for that itself to blow you apart? The tall mill ahead of him suddenly seemed not nearly big enough.

He reached the wall. Shouldn't he order Tom to stay behind too? He took a sideways glance at his son's set face and knew he would be wasting his time. From close underneath its shuttered walls, the mill loomed huge. They were working along the front wall, away from that bead of light, towards the further corner. They had to climb over a crumbling wall into a patch of waste ground, where the neighbouring mill had been demolished. As they dropped down, a cat fled yowling from almost underneath them.

‘Why do they sound so scary?' Tom attempted to laugh. ‘I can see why they associate them with witches.'

Their footsteps sounded loud in the silence that followed. The evening light was fading, but soon there was a glimmer from the canal ahead.

‘Round here,' Nick whispered. ‘It wasn't far from this end.' He found the window. They had not been able to flatten the metal grille back over the opening as completely as it had been before they broke in. Nick's fingers closed round the rusted metal and tugged.

The grille sprang open. The gap was wide enough to let them through. Nick straightened up and looked at Tom in the dusk.

‘I'll go first. Stay here. I'll call if I find anything.'

‘Thanks, but I'm coming in too. We've no idea how many of them there are. If necessary, one of us can take them on, while the other gets Mum out.'

‘If she's here.'

‘Those phone calls as good as said she was. He was goading you to come and find her.'

‘That's what worries me. Why?'

‘If those slogans on the walls are his – or theirs – then they're not quite sane. They
want
to see the end of the world.'

Nick kept his private fears to himself: that this was personal. That the bomb maker wanted to punish the Fewings family for discovering his factory. That he was going to make them the first victims of his device.

The crazy thing was that they had had no idea what was going on in the mill. All their attention had been on Hugh Street and the criminal activity there. If the bomb maker had not made those threatening phone calls, their break-in at the mill would have passed off without further thought.

Nick drew a deep breath to steady himself. Whoever had made those threats, he was in there now. He must be driven by a death wish to wreak havoc on an evil world, even if he killed himself with the rest of them.

He put a leg over the sill into the darkness beyond.

A
s his foot connected with the floor, Nick had the uncanny feeling that he was stepping into another world. The former weaving shed was in almost total darkness. The deepening grey sky of evening should have glimmered through the ranks of high windows that had once cast light on the weavers' intricate play of weft and warp. But most were obscured now by boards or grilles.

He sensed, rather than saw, the rows of looms rising on either side of him.

Then he saw it. A thin line of light at floor level, far down the end of the vast room. It was so faint he had to blink to be sure he was not imagining it.

‘Do you think he's got a battery lamp in there?' Tom's voice murmured at his elbow. ‘Or has he patched into the mains supply?'

‘Go back!' hissed Nick, startled.

‘Like I said. Two of us are better than one.'

Nick felt a cold uncertainty. It had seemed simple from outside. Break in, find Suzie, free her and flee. The gloom of the weaving shed was silent around them. He had no idea where Suzie might be held.

‘I should have brought a torch,' he cursed himself.

Tom was whispering. ‘That guy was taunting you to find him. Now's your chance. He's got to be the other side of that door, where the light is.'

‘I was rather hoping to avoid a confrontation. Just get Suzie out and run.'

‘What's that?' Tom stopped abruptly.

‘What? I didn't hear anything.'

‘Over there. Among the machines . . . No, it's gone now. I thought I heard a sort of thump.'

They listened intently. No further sound came from that direction. But ahead of them now rose the sound of voices from the other side of the end door.

‘Sounds like they're having an argument.' Nick could almost hear the grin in Tom's voice. ‘So much the better for us. The bad news is that there's more than one of them. The good news is that they're falling out with each other. Should add to the confusion when we meet them.'

‘I only wish the way out wasn't such a long way back.'

‘Maybe there's a door at this end of the mill. We went round the far end. But from what I saw, you could probably break out through any of these windows and the grilles would just give way.'

‘I hope you're right. I wouldn't want to be trapped inside. I'm not as sure as you are that they won't be armed.'

‘Have you noticed something?' Tom muttered.

‘No. What?'

‘It's not just quiet inside here. I can't hear a sound outside either. What's happened to the police? I thought they'd come screaming after us when Millie told them where we were going.'

Nick stopped again. Now that he tuned his ear to the wider distance, he realized that Tom was right. The derelict area around the mill was ominously silent. He thought of Millie waiting out there alone in the gathering dusk and felt guilty. It was growing harder to know what to do to keep his family safe.

His attention was suddenly wrenched back to the scene in front of him. Some twenty paces away, the door at the end of the weaving shed burst open. The artificial light in the room beyond was not brilliant, but it seemed to flood the space with unexpected dazzle. Huge shadows of the looms were thrown back on either side.

Directly in front of him, where the light was strongest, stood two men.

Within the small room was a ginger-haired young man with an angry face above a stubbled chin. He wore glasses and a stained and ragged jersey. Nick was not sure whether the first impression was of an impoverished student or a down-and-out. But something about him was naggingly familiar. The face within the shadow of the cyclist's hood? He didn't think so. That had been thinner, younger.

The student type in that fair-isle jersey, lingering in the precinct yesterday afternoon.

He had a frightening glimpse of a workbench behind the young man. An array of parts which might be the things Tom had read out from that list. A small collection of tools. A bundle from which wires protruded.

But it was the other man, now coming through the doorway, who seized his attention. Nick's jaw fell open. Striding towards him, then stopping abruptly as he saw Nick and Tom, was the plump-faced figure he had confronted before. Harry Redfern, the Baptist minister who had driven the blue Honda.

Nick was consumed, for a moment by disbelief, and then by rage. He lunged forward and fastened his hands around the thick neck.

‘It was you all along! And I let myself be convinced by you – or at least by your wife. I thought it was just a coincidence that you were following us. A Baptist minister having a day off with his kids. And all the time . . . it was just a cover!
Where's Suzie
?'

His thumbs were pressing on the minister's windpipe, throttling him.

‘Dad!' he faintly heard Tom cry.

But he had eyes only for the purpling face in front of his eyes, the heavy perspiration breaking out. The frightened, bulbous brown eyes. The man was struggling to tear Nick's hands away from his throat. He was quite a big man, but not athletic. He was no match for Nick's rage.

Harry Redfern was fighting to speak, but Nick's hands barely allowed him to breathe. A harsh laugh came from the lamplit room behind the pair.

‘Well, now! There's a turn-up for the book. The Reverend Henry Redfern, pillar of the Baptist Church, prison visitor and general do-gooder, cast in the role of the horseman of the Apocalypse!'

From the very first words, Nick recognized that hoarse voice, the taunting tone. His pressure on the Reverend Redfern's windpipe slackened, though he did not let go.

‘You! You made those phone calls. Is this some diabolical plot you two have hatched up between you? But what the hell has this got to do with Suzie? Let her go!'

His eyes flew past the younger man in the ragged jersey. He was searching the small room behind him. It might once have been the mill office, but it had clearly been turned into a laboratory. Nick tried to shut his mind to the horrible significance of the bundle of equipment on the bench. He scanned the narrow space for anywhere that might be hiding Suzie. There were floor cupboards. Could she really be crammed inside one of those, unable to move? He shuddered at the exquisite pain this would cause her after so many hours.

As Nick's hands slackened, Harry Redfern managed to gasp out his first words.

‘Mr Fewings! Nick! You've got the wrong man . . . I've no idea where your good wife is . . . I only wish I could help you.'

‘Then what in God's name are you doing here?'

‘I know . . .' He panted for air. ‘I know Dominic.' His head jerked in the direction of the young man in his makeshift laboratory. ‘I was . . . his prison chaplain. I've been trying . . . to help him sort himself out, after he was released. That's why, when you came to my house . . .'

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. A single glimpse over Harry Redfern's broad shoulder into his sitting room. The glowering young man the minister had been talking to.

That same name. Dominic.

Uneasily, afraid that he was being tricked yet again, Nick released the minister. Harry Redfern stepped back thankfully and rubbed his bruised neck around his dog collar.

Nick stared at the bespectacled Dominic. The young man was frowning now. The mocking laughter had gone from his stubbled face. He was glancing uncertainly at the large windows on either side of the darkened weaving shed. A ghost of grey twilight still crept in through the grilles. It was not enough to penetrate far into the shadowed interior among those stationary looms.

‘Where are they, then?' he asked sharply.

‘Who?'

‘The police. You've told them, haven't you? You must have told them when you found out it was here.' He took a step towards them, anger darkening his face. ‘You tricked me! I don't know what all that was, going on in Hugh Street. But it certainly wasn't me. It took you longer than I thought, didn't it, to work out that it was here?' His tone took on a bitter venom. ‘I could curse you for that. I could have kept quiet. I could have carried it through. This wasn't how I meant it to end. A dirty bomb's no good unless you set it off where it will cause maximum panic. I was going to contaminate the Square Mile. Strike them right in the heart of London. Bankers. Tourists. Politicians! All the servants of Mammon. I told him!' He jerked his head contemptuously at Harry Redfern.